KEY POINTS:
Ignore the lotto propaganda, very few of us get rich quick.
But it seems pretty easy to get poor quick.
The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, reported on Thursday that the Australian stockmarket has halved in value since hitting its high last year - equating to a paper loss of some $800 billon, Australian dollars too. At the same time the US Dow Jones slipped below the "psychologically important" 8,000 mark - it was pushing 13,000 last year. I've never really understood the "psychological importance" of numbers - how much worse is 7,997.28 (the Dow's close on Wednesday) than 8,000?
For some reason my NZX is down today so I can't give exact figures but you can bet the New Zealand market is in a similar downbeat mode - new lows are probably being plumbed as I write. Although I don't have any data to back this up, I suspect, in a relative sense, the NZX hasn't fared quite as poorly as Australia or swung quite as violently between peaks and troughs.
As an Australian managed fund salesman told me last week the New Zealand investment community appears to act a bit more cautiously than its trans-Tasman equivalents.
The other important consideration, of course, is that New Zealand is already poor. We don't have quite as far to fall as Australia.
While the latest government stats show the median income of New Zealanders has increased, in OECD terms we don't earn much.
So perhaps the state of the NZX is not as psychologically important to New Zealanders as the ASX is to Aussies.
As usual, opinions are divided on whether share markets have bottomed out. A report from Australian research firm Lincoln Indicators this week looked on the bright side. While the pain is intense now, the Lincoln report says, within 10 years the ASX will pass its previous peak.
That might be too vague for some. Right now, the last will and testament of 15th Century French writer, Francois Rabelais (1494-1553) could seem more pertinent: "I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor."
